The Mad world of a flat earther......
As internet debates go, the one concerning the shape of the Earth sits right up there with the truly bizarre. Unless you are insulated from reality or don't follow the trends on Youtube, you can't possibly have failed to notice the number of rather strange individuals who are claiming this lovely planet is in fact flat!
Now, maybe you are like me and laugh to yourself at such claims, but in all seriousness, these people need to be educated in a few basics that without any effort at all, destroy their whole case.
I'm going to start with the most obvious of obvious things. Namely the observable action of the Sun. It sets it rises, it never changes size. That in itself is simply impossible on a flat Earth model. Basic trigonometry using the flat Earth model for the Sun distance makes a complete mockery of the model itself. Shall we look at it?
The actual verifiable angular diameter of the Sun viewed from anywhere on the planet, at any time of day and every day is 0.5 degrees. It varies very slightly by a small fraction, but that is what the human eye sees. It can be verified simply by viewing the Sun through clouds or a filter. The flat Earth model uses a quite ludicrous solar distance of 3,000 miles. It must do this as an inept attempt to explain day and night cycles(it fails miserably, but that is another story!).
Using trigonometry, try not to laugh here, 3,000 miles and 0.5 degrees makes the Sun diameter 26.2 miles. Now at any given point where the Sun goes directly overhead(near the equator), that would be the nearest distance to the Sun at zenith, but not as it lowers or rises. So let's examine the Sun at say 45 degrees to the observer. 3,000 miles to zenith and a 45 degree angle to actual puts the Sun now at a distance of 4,240 miles.
So, we have the Sun diameter at 26.2 miles and the distance is now 4,240 miles, it gives an angular diameter for the Sun at 0.35 degrees. Whoah there! A 45 degree elevation of the Sun returned a 30% reduction in its size compared to directly overhead. But folks, it gets way worse than that. Let's put the Sun down near the horizon at 15 degrees elevation(75 degrees off zenith). An angle of 75 degrees and 3000 miles to zenith puts the Sun at a distance of 11,600 miles.
Now, this is where the crap hits the air conditioning system. The Sun diameter of 26.2 miles and a distance of 11,600 miles gives the angular diameter at 0.129! That is very slightly more than a quarter of what we actually see at 0.5 degrees.
We're done already and that was just the first point! If you really want to kick the FE model whilst it's dead, how about the simple revelation that when the Sun is at 75 degrees from vertical it is 11,600 miles away! Standing on the equator in Singapore, the Sun still visible and not set yet, it sits 1000 miles short of zenith above the opposite side of the world! Even small children know it's the opposite on the other side of the world, ie. night time. If we move on to things like starfields rotating in opposite directions in Australia compared to the United Kingdom, there is no way for a flat Earth to explain this. Stars that are visible only in the Northern and Southern hemispheres exclusively. We also see the Lunar phases inverted in the Southern hemisphere. This has an "explanation" that is also quite ridiculous. It goes something like this: place a picture of the Moon on the ceiling, look at it from opposite sides of the room. Voila. Sadly, that is just nonsense. Here's a good way to show why: Imagine you are on a track that goes around the Earth at the same speed as the Moon on the same path it follows(on the FE model). Always you view the Moon just rising. At what point does it suddenly flip over! Another thing about the phases shows the sheer impossibility of the FE model. The Sun and Moon doing these great circles and one catching up the other. That's how they "explain" the phase changes. However, this creates a nasty and unavoidable problem. The Moon is visible at any one time across several thousands of miles of night sky. With a fixed position of Sun and Moon at any given time and a simultaneous visibility as stated, the crescent area of the Moon illuminated by the Sun, visible at opposite ends of this wide section, would be significantly different to each other. Clearly they are not!
Speaking of the Moon, over many decades, Radio hams have bounced radio waves off of the surface and timed the returns. Just from an approximation of the time taken, it puts the Moon at a quarter of a million miles away. Yet all humans see the Moon pass in front of the Sun during eclipses. The "explanation" is that the radio hams are all lying or mistaken. This broad-based claim runs quite frequently amongst the FE fraternity, who quite frighteningly claim that all space travel is also faked, including the highly visible International Space Station! Put those dark glasses on, don't look through your telescope, here it comes over the horizon. You have to laugh at the madness really. The mantra is repeated to encompass literally million of human beings as complicit in the space travel "hoax". In addition to the ISS, smaller satellites are visible, trackable and exactly where their orbital paths say they should be. Those pesky radio hams pick up all sorts of signals from the satellites as they lock on and track them across the skies. Tens of millions of dishes all across Europe and North Africa, aim at TV satellites in geostationary orbit. These provide highly directional signals that simply stop being picked up outside the span of the transmission. There have been some 8,000 space launches recorded, including probes throughout the solar system. The number of people to be fooled or involved is astronomical, considering data is being received in massive volumes on a daily basis. This includes weather satellites for every country and data coming down in gigabytes per hour!
Now one of the key issues the flat earth crowd complain about is not seeing the curve. If you use simple trigonometry and take a bog standard visual span of 90 degrees, at sea level head height, the human eye will simply be unable to detect the 4 hundredths of a degree of variance. At 1000 metres it's still a paltry 1 degree and by the time you get up to cruising altitude for a jet it has only mustered over 3 degrees. Just about visible. Going higher, at 100 kilometres it is still only 10 degrees variance. The Earth is very big, that is why we don't see much curvature. Here is a simple plot of the curvature :
As you can see, the actual visible angles at very high altitudes are quite small. Cameras with wider angle than the effective visibility of the human eye will exaggerate this curvature. In addition, due to the way the light path changes as it crosses over the centre of the lens, it can invert the visible curve. During the transition between the visible curve and the inversion, it flattens. The flatties tend to have kittens when they see this occurring and make lots of noise, but they always fail to mention that cameras on weather balloons, filming this very thing, always pick up the obvious partials of a spherical layer of a full Earth. On a flat Earth, that is simply impossible.
Second of the key issues is the complaint that we see things we shouldn't based on the curvature figures. Pretty much the standard reply to this whole thing is refraction of light as it passes through the atmosphere. There is also the effects of heat inversions that cause mirages and other variances. The most telling thing about this issue is that quite clearly, the bottom of these distant objects is missing. Numerous videos now reside on Youtube showing boats disappearing hull first, but rather than concentrate on that let's view Chicago from a variety of distances:
The question is not why can we see more than we should, but where have the bottoms of the buildings gone! Over the curve of the horizon. Simple.
So far we have discussed just simple things that should stop this flat Earth nonsense from even being raised, but never let facts and evidence get in the way of a good conspiracy. A conspiracy of millions over thousands of years, when poor old Richard Nixon couldn't keep the Watergate scandal quiet and worse, Bill Clinton couldn't silence the oral habits of female interns!
Lunar eclipses. Another slam dunk of the FE theory. Quite simply put, the Earth moves between Sun and Moon and causes an eclipse. This is where the flatties get ridiculously amusing about what we are seeing, because clearly the flat Earth model has a major brain fart on this matter. Both Sun and Moon are visible in the sky! They claim some invisible object moves in front of the Sun's path to the Moon and blocks out most of the light. This is an object nobody on Earth can detect, even when it is doing the blocking! These lunar eclipses are predicted to the millisecond by astronomical data that goes back and forward as many years as is needed. Yet the flatties claim this is all made up because that isn't what we are seeing.
Night and day, a fairly easy to understand occurrence for us all, is another nail in this dead duck coffin. The Sun is claimed to be 3,000 miles away on a path that mathematics prove is gibberish, illuminating in a way that is not consistent with basic physics or reality. With very little effort, it can be proven that the Sun illuminates half the globe at any given time. With refraction, this incursion creates zones of twilight. From the FE model, we have this circular flat earth and a Sun doing some bizarre unexplained rotation around the equator. A quick diagram showing this:
It doesn't take much thought to see the problem here. The circular area of illumination does not create a 50% illumination of the Earth. In fact the only way to get the correct illumination is from a light source that creates a magic straight line across a diameter of the flat Earth circle. Blatantly impossible. All this whilst the spotlight disappears/reappears over the edge of the horizon and doesn't change size whatsoever. Don't forget that the Moon also does this exact same thing with no size change. All in all, observational evidence that slaps the forehead of every flatnut!
Take a look at the FE model Earth from the picture above. The equator is provably 25,000 miles around. However the distance from the southern tip of South America all around to Tasmania is a circle that is double the distance of the equatorial circle. South America to Tasmania becomes 25,000 miles. Don't laugh. You can actually look at that idiotic map and show that only the pole to pole distances will match reality. The ones around in a circle most certainly do not.
We're getting near the end of this dismantling exercise. Sadly I don't expect it to break through the hard shell of resistance routinely exhibited by flat Earth conspiracists, though hopefully it will stop those approaching the edge and about to fall off with the penguins! We haven't even touched on gravity, yet another thing denied by these barmy people, because there is no way it can work on a flat Earth. We also haven't discussed the mysterious forces that make the Sun and Moon magically revolve around the flat Earth in their thus proven impossible paths. Ah well, maybe another day. I'll leave you with some videos that are both hilarious and totally kill the flat earth claims:
Now, maybe you are like me and laugh to yourself at such claims, but in all seriousness, these people need to be educated in a few basics that without any effort at all, destroy their whole case.
I'm going to start with the most obvious of obvious things. Namely the observable action of the Sun. It sets it rises, it never changes size. That in itself is simply impossible on a flat Earth model. Basic trigonometry using the flat Earth model for the Sun distance makes a complete mockery of the model itself. Shall we look at it?
The actual verifiable angular diameter of the Sun viewed from anywhere on the planet, at any time of day and every day is 0.5 degrees. It varies very slightly by a small fraction, but that is what the human eye sees. It can be verified simply by viewing the Sun through clouds or a filter. The flat Earth model uses a quite ludicrous solar distance of 3,000 miles. It must do this as an inept attempt to explain day and night cycles(it fails miserably, but that is another story!).
Using trigonometry, try not to laugh here, 3,000 miles and 0.5 degrees makes the Sun diameter 26.2 miles. Now at any given point where the Sun goes directly overhead(near the equator), that would be the nearest distance to the Sun at zenith, but not as it lowers or rises. So let's examine the Sun at say 45 degrees to the observer. 3,000 miles to zenith and a 45 degree angle to actual puts the Sun now at a distance of 4,240 miles.
So, we have the Sun diameter at 26.2 miles and the distance is now 4,240 miles, it gives an angular diameter for the Sun at 0.35 degrees. Whoah there! A 45 degree elevation of the Sun returned a 30% reduction in its size compared to directly overhead. But folks, it gets way worse than that. Let's put the Sun down near the horizon at 15 degrees elevation(75 degrees off zenith). An angle of 75 degrees and 3000 miles to zenith puts the Sun at a distance of 11,600 miles.
Now, this is where the crap hits the air conditioning system. The Sun diameter of 26.2 miles and a distance of 11,600 miles gives the angular diameter at 0.129! That is very slightly more than a quarter of what we actually see at 0.5 degrees.
We're done already and that was just the first point! If you really want to kick the FE model whilst it's dead, how about the simple revelation that when the Sun is at 75 degrees from vertical it is 11,600 miles away! Standing on the equator in Singapore, the Sun still visible and not set yet, it sits 1000 miles short of zenith above the opposite side of the world! Even small children know it's the opposite on the other side of the world, ie. night time. If we move on to things like starfields rotating in opposite directions in Australia compared to the United Kingdom, there is no way for a flat Earth to explain this. Stars that are visible only in the Northern and Southern hemispheres exclusively. We also see the Lunar phases inverted in the Southern hemisphere. This has an "explanation" that is also quite ridiculous. It goes something like this: place a picture of the Moon on the ceiling, look at it from opposite sides of the room. Voila. Sadly, that is just nonsense. Here's a good way to show why: Imagine you are on a track that goes around the Earth at the same speed as the Moon on the same path it follows(on the FE model). Always you view the Moon just rising. At what point does it suddenly flip over! Another thing about the phases shows the sheer impossibility of the FE model. The Sun and Moon doing these great circles and one catching up the other. That's how they "explain" the phase changes. However, this creates a nasty and unavoidable problem. The Moon is visible at any one time across several thousands of miles of night sky. With a fixed position of Sun and Moon at any given time and a simultaneous visibility as stated, the crescent area of the Moon illuminated by the Sun, visible at opposite ends of this wide section, would be significantly different to each other. Clearly they are not!
Speaking of the Moon, over many decades, Radio hams have bounced radio waves off of the surface and timed the returns. Just from an approximation of the time taken, it puts the Moon at a quarter of a million miles away. Yet all humans see the Moon pass in front of the Sun during eclipses. The "explanation" is that the radio hams are all lying or mistaken. This broad-based claim runs quite frequently amongst the FE fraternity, who quite frighteningly claim that all space travel is also faked, including the highly visible International Space Station! Put those dark glasses on, don't look through your telescope, here it comes over the horizon. You have to laugh at the madness really. The mantra is repeated to encompass literally million of human beings as complicit in the space travel "hoax". In addition to the ISS, smaller satellites are visible, trackable and exactly where their orbital paths say they should be. Those pesky radio hams pick up all sorts of signals from the satellites as they lock on and track them across the skies. Tens of millions of dishes all across Europe and North Africa, aim at TV satellites in geostationary orbit. These provide highly directional signals that simply stop being picked up outside the span of the transmission. There have been some 8,000 space launches recorded, including probes throughout the solar system. The number of people to be fooled or involved is astronomical, considering data is being received in massive volumes on a daily basis. This includes weather satellites for every country and data coming down in gigabytes per hour!
Now one of the key issues the flat earth crowd complain about is not seeing the curve. If you use simple trigonometry and take a bog standard visual span of 90 degrees, at sea level head height, the human eye will simply be unable to detect the 4 hundredths of a degree of variance. At 1000 metres it's still a paltry 1 degree and by the time you get up to cruising altitude for a jet it has only mustered over 3 degrees. Just about visible. Going higher, at 100 kilometres it is still only 10 degrees variance. The Earth is very big, that is why we don't see much curvature. Here is a simple plot of the curvature :
As you can see, the actual visible angles at very high altitudes are quite small. Cameras with wider angle than the effective visibility of the human eye will exaggerate this curvature. In addition, due to the way the light path changes as it crosses over the centre of the lens, it can invert the visible curve. During the transition between the visible curve and the inversion, it flattens. The flatties tend to have kittens when they see this occurring and make lots of noise, but they always fail to mention that cameras on weather balloons, filming this very thing, always pick up the obvious partials of a spherical layer of a full Earth. On a flat Earth, that is simply impossible.
Second of the key issues is the complaint that we see things we shouldn't based on the curvature figures. Pretty much the standard reply to this whole thing is refraction of light as it passes through the atmosphere. There is also the effects of heat inversions that cause mirages and other variances. The most telling thing about this issue is that quite clearly, the bottom of these distant objects is missing. Numerous videos now reside on Youtube showing boats disappearing hull first, but rather than concentrate on that let's view Chicago from a variety of distances:
The question is not why can we see more than we should, but where have the bottoms of the buildings gone! Over the curve of the horizon. Simple.
So far we have discussed just simple things that should stop this flat Earth nonsense from even being raised, but never let facts and evidence get in the way of a good conspiracy. A conspiracy of millions over thousands of years, when poor old Richard Nixon couldn't keep the Watergate scandal quiet and worse, Bill Clinton couldn't silence the oral habits of female interns!
Lunar eclipses. Another slam dunk of the FE theory. Quite simply put, the Earth moves between Sun and Moon and causes an eclipse. This is where the flatties get ridiculously amusing about what we are seeing, because clearly the flat Earth model has a major brain fart on this matter. Both Sun and Moon are visible in the sky! They claim some invisible object moves in front of the Sun's path to the Moon and blocks out most of the light. This is an object nobody on Earth can detect, even when it is doing the blocking! These lunar eclipses are predicted to the millisecond by astronomical data that goes back and forward as many years as is needed. Yet the flatties claim this is all made up because that isn't what we are seeing.
Night and day, a fairly easy to understand occurrence for us all, is another nail in this dead duck coffin. The Sun is claimed to be 3,000 miles away on a path that mathematics prove is gibberish, illuminating in a way that is not consistent with basic physics or reality. With very little effort, it can be proven that the Sun illuminates half the globe at any given time. With refraction, this incursion creates zones of twilight. From the FE model, we have this circular flat earth and a Sun doing some bizarre unexplained rotation around the equator. A quick diagram showing this:
It doesn't take much thought to see the problem here. The circular area of illumination does not create a 50% illumination of the Earth. In fact the only way to get the correct illumination is from a light source that creates a magic straight line across a diameter of the flat Earth circle. Blatantly impossible. All this whilst the spotlight disappears/reappears over the edge of the horizon and doesn't change size whatsoever. Don't forget that the Moon also does this exact same thing with no size change. All in all, observational evidence that slaps the forehead of every flatnut!
Take a look at the FE model Earth from the picture above. The equator is provably 25,000 miles around. However the distance from the southern tip of South America all around to Tasmania is a circle that is double the distance of the equatorial circle. South America to Tasmania becomes 25,000 miles. Don't laugh. You can actually look at that idiotic map and show that only the pole to pole distances will match reality. The ones around in a circle most certainly do not.
We're getting near the end of this dismantling exercise. Sadly I don't expect it to break through the hard shell of resistance routinely exhibited by flat Earth conspiracists, though hopefully it will stop those approaching the edge and about to fall off with the penguins! We haven't even touched on gravity, yet another thing denied by these barmy people, because there is no way it can work on a flat Earth. We also haven't discussed the mysterious forces that make the Sun and Moon magically revolve around the flat Earth in their thus proven impossible paths. Ah well, maybe another day. I'll leave you with some videos that are both hilarious and totally kill the flat earth claims:
Another idiotic claim made by flat earthers is that all the balloon flights show the horizon is flat.
What they do, is deceptively or stupidly pause the video as the natural curvature crosses the convex lens and it straightens very briefly before going inverted. All this occurs as the camera .moves upwards.
Now the major problem with this is that the cameras invariably spin around 360 degrees and in doing so, come back on themselves, all the while with the horizon in view. For anyone who isn't
an imbecile, quite clearly that shape forms a circle.
There is no straight line horizon that can form a circle.
Comments
Post a Comment